This application, in some embodiments thereof, relates to wireless radio network and, more specifically, but not exclusively, to assigning channels to radio transceiver devices in a wireless radio network.
In many wireless systems, such as wireless local area networks (WLANs), broadcast systems and/or wireless cellular networks, the system includes multiple overlapping and/or non-overlapping electromagnetic radiation frequency channels. When the system also includes multiple radio transceiver devices, for example WiFi™ access points (APs) or cellular base stations, one or more channels are assigned to each radio transceiver. As used herein, the terms channel assignments and/or allocations are used interchangeably to mean the configuration of a radio transceiver to use a particular channel of a base frequency. As used herein, the terms radio transceiver and/or access point mean a WLAN access point, a broadcast network transmitter, a wireless cellular network base station, and the like. Channel assignment to each transceiver may be static or dynamic. The detailed examples of some embodiments of methods and devices described herein are taken primarily from wireless local area networks for simplicity and clarity, yet other embodiments of the methods and devices may be applicable to other radio resource sharing technologies, such as broadcast systems and/or wireless cellular networks.
In WLANs, optimal channel assignment may be found by trying all possible combinations of channels for all APs in the system, and picking the channel combination that optimizes a cost function and/or network goal, as in combinatorial optimization. Suboptimal approaches may include AP grouping, Iterative, and Round-robin Iterative methods. The AP grouping method may divide the APs into small groups and then divide channels within groups. The Iterative method may allocate a channel to the AP with highest interference to reduce that interference, wait for a short period, such as a few minutes, and then repeat. The Round-robin Iterative method may order all APs according to interference, allocate a channel to the first AP in the ordered list, wait for a short period, such as a few minutes, repeat the process again for the next AP in the ordered list, and continue until all APs have been assigned. When the ordered list is completed, the process repeats again starting with a new ordering.